1995-12-09 04:00:00 PDT New York -- Eight people in a Harlem clothing store were killed yesterday in a fierce blaze that police believe was deliberately set as part of bitter landlord-tenant dispute that led to angry protests in the neighborhood.

Among the dead was a man police suspect set fire to the store.

The fire consumed the building on Harlem's main thoroughfare, 125th Street, shortly after a tall gunman, waving a revolver, burst into Freddie's Fashion Mart across the street from the storied Apollo Theater.

Police said last night they believed the gunman was one of a group of demonstrators who had picketed the store in recent weeks in a dispute over the threatened eviction of a subtenant, the Record Shack, a neighborhood institution.

Police say the gunman, whom they did not identify, was found dead with a revolver in his hand, reeking of accelerant, a flammable liquid. Beside him was a white container that officials believe held the accel

erant. Four other people were shot in the incident and escaped from the store before the fire enveloped it.

According to officials and residents of the neighborhood, the fire followed a months-long dispute that involved the owner of the building, a black Baptist congregation called the United House of Prayer; the owner of the clothing store, Fred Harari; and Sikhulu Shange, owner of the neighboring Record Shack.

Shange, a South African black whose shop has specialized in blues, Motown, African and Caribbean music for more than 20 years, was being evicted as a subtenant of Harari, apparently at the instigation of the church, according to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN

In the past several weeks, there have been a dozen or so pickets outside Freddie's, urging a boycott of the store because they believed it did not employ blacks and was behind the eviction of Shange's business.

The commander of the 28th Precinct, Deputy Inspector Joyce Stephen, said the Police Department, in addition to sending uniformed officers to monitor the pickets, had opened a racial bias investigation of an incident that arose during the protesting November 29.

Stephen said a security guard told the police that one of the demonstrators had said, "We're going to burn and loot the Jews."

Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton rushed to the scene yesterday. The mayor, while saying that the investigation focused on the protests against the clothing store, also urged New Yorkers not to rush to judgments about the case.

SHARPTON CRITICAL

At the same time, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped to sponsor the protests against the clothing store, criticized the investigators for quickly linking the conflagration to the protests.

Because of the intensity of the fire, it took more than two hours before firefighters could reach the inside of the gutted store.

Besides the gunman, they found three bodies huddled together in a back room on the first floor and four more bodies clustered together in the basement.

The police and Medical Examiner's office said seven victims apparently died of smoke inhalation. But it was unclear whether the gunman died of smoke inhalation or the single bullet wound he suffered.

In the early moments of the confrontation, police say, the gunman fired on two police officers who arrived on the scene, but Bratton said a preliminary check of the weapons of the police officers on the scene indicated that their guns had not been fired.

Of the four people wounded in the gunfire, the police said three of them were listed in critical condition.

POSSIBLY FALSE ID

The police said the gunman was carrying an identification card with the name Aboudima Moulika, and an address on Mount Morris Park West. But they are not sure whether that is his true identity. Detectives went to the address and said residents there had never heard of him and did not recognize the person in the photograph.

"We're confident he was not known at that location," said a detective involved in the investigation.

The day began like any other for the dozen or so workers in Freddie's. There were construction crews working on a store expansion and a $5 million renovation of the church.

Suddenly, their ordinary world exploded into chaos and confusion, gunfire, flames and death. A man walked into the store, kicked over a table, sloshed the flammable liquid around, shouted for people to get out, and then began shooting.

At 10:12 a.m., Bratton said, a passer-by on 125th Street told two officers from the 28th Precinct who were walking a regular patrol beat that a tall man with a gun had gone into the store.

OFFICER TRAPPED

As they raced into the store, the man was shooting. Three wounded people were helped out of the store, but one of the officers was pinned down, trapped inside. More police, some from the neighboring 25th Precinct, responded to the call for backup, and they got the officer out unhurt, the commissioner said.

At St. Luke's Hospital, where the three badly wounded victims, all men, were taken, Dr. Kevin V. Sanborn, the associate director of anesthesiology, said that one of them had said that "a man came into the store and started the fire right away and as people tried to escape, the man started to fire at them."

Across the street, Thomas Pierre, a voter registration worker, glanced out his third-floor office window when he heard sirens and shots, and he saw police rushing up and man dressed like a construction worker staggering out of the building in pain.

"Suddenly the whole front went up in flames," Pierre said. "It started just like that."